Driving Talent Acquisition for the Future of Mobility

Managed Solutions & Advisory Services

Challenge: Our client, a software and technology company carved out from a Fortune 100 OEM supplier, is leading the autonomous mobility revolution. As a new company in an emerging field, our client needed a true partner who could build a talent function that would eventually steer itself. In the first six months, our client needed to hire its cross-functional leadership team, along with more than one hundred skilled Perception, Motion Planning and Localization Engineers, among others, in diverse markets across the United States.

Action: To build their winning team, the client chose our twin offerings of Advisory Services and Managed Solutions. In the same way our client must anticipate industry shifts, so do Waterstone’s senior advisors plan for unique hiring needs. Prior to contract, our founders built and screened a national pipeline of leaders in software and engineering aligned with the client’s specific needs. Our Managed Solutions team created and deployed customized hiring plans for local offices in Pittsburgh, Las Vegas and Troy, MI. For each hard-to-fill role, Waterstone implemented a comprehensive services menu: market research and trend-mapping, competency alignment in position descriptions, compensation benchmarking, targeted candidate marketing, skill-based interview training for hiring managers, and evidence-based selection. Acting as an extension of our client, Waterstone crafted the candidate-facing experience from scratch, and seamlessly guided candidates from passive sourcing and through onboarding.

Result: Our client benefited from both top-level strategic guidance and day-to-day execution and support. Waterstone’s senior partners speak the language of the C-Suite and leveraged 30-year relationships to deliver proven leaders in software, product, sales and marketing. Within two weeks of contract, our client had its 13-person lead team in place. At the other end of the experience spectrum, our Managed Solutions team accessed the complex talent ecosystems of emerging software, then crafted original marketing to target and attract the most desirable candidates nationally. Our networks in research universities (Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT) helped connect a pioneering company with the brightest young talent - available or not. Our localized coaching and training resulted in new hires across functional teams and markets.

In Waterstone, our client found a partner who could help them ramp efficiently and reliably, exceed hiring objectives, and deliver ahead of schedule. This gave them both replicable systems for talent acquisition and a position of strength with regard to human capital during their crucial first year.